Another New Orleans Novel 

Another New Orleans Novel

I'm onto Walker Percy now. I tried Love Among the Ruins, but I find it unreadable. A machine that reads all kinds of things about the soul and happiness? Please. I've been charmed by The Second Coming for years, but I think it's too much the cliche: older man/younger woman. The Percy novel where pro-choicers are running a day care, molesting the children and poisoning the water, is Republican politics at its nuttiest.

But The Moviegoer: now there is a novel. Maybe Percy was finished his best work when he was about 55?

It's sad and beautiful. I'm not sure I understand it. A lot of it is simply cherchez la femme. The sudden trip toward the end that gets Jack in so much trouble with his aunt is actually Kate's idea, and he probably had assumed that Kate was letting her mother--Jack's aunt--know about it. Yet when he is chewed out, he says none of this. He is loyal to Kate. He probably loves her (certainly intends to marry her). He knows she has some degree of mental illness, and he doesn't want to force her to admit what happened, or even admit that they have been introducing themselves as engaged. If she wants out of the engagement, he wants to be sure she can just get out. So there is maybe love, gallantry, friendship, looking out for her. The guy at the end of Daisy Miller flunks a love test; Jack passes one.

Beyond that, Jack is forced to listen to his aunt's whole speech about how men in her life used to have some gallantry about them; now they apparently don't, and he is exhibit A. He seems to agree with her that the modern world is contemptible; but he can't agree with her reasons or worldview. He is just as convinced as any moviegoing cretin that his aunt's old aristocratic world is dead. So he criticizes modern people for their malaise, or their passive acceptance of it, or their emphasis on sincerity as if this were the only virtue--but it's not clear what he has to offer instead. Love of Kate, of one good (fragile) woman? So in a way his aunt is right--even if he had better reasons than she knows for the Chicago trip, he is one of the modern people she finds contemptible? But he is ... something. More thoughtful? The way he treats Kate and her illness--in a way, unsentimentally--shows that he at least knows how to admire and live with people who are (despite everything) made of good stuff?

I don't know.

"In fact, there is nothing more to say to him. The best one can do is deflate the pressure a bit, the terrible romantic pressure, and leave him alone. He is a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to movies."

Lots of New Orleans--the novel unfolds basically over carnival week, one crewe and parade after another, and ends at the end of Mardi Gras, "fat Tuesday." Lots of social gradations: Cajuns from the swamp who have made it in the city pretend to be Creoles. The Smiths, Jack's lower-class Catholic relatives, live like Cajuns, or at least can revert to living in a fishing hut right over the swamp, eating whatever they catch. Jack's date, a nice Protestant girl from the South: "'I surely didn't know people ate crawfish!'--by which she means that in Eufala only Negroes eat crawfish." The blacks who still function as faithful retainers to old Creole moneyed families somehow show by face and voice that they refuse to be servile--they somehow go right to the edge of impertinence, without crossing over. And if the whites want to be waited on, they put up with this, all their lives.

Fathers who run away, and fathers who want to. I've been working on family histories, and my grandfathers were, to some extent, runaway fathers. When my aunt saw this suggestion in print about her father, she was indignant.

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